Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4040 in Software
• Brand: Jasc Software
• Released on: 2003-05-12
• Platforms: Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows Me
• Format: CD-ROM

Amazon.com Review
It's good to see that even mature applications can benefit from innovative thinking--Jasc has improved the latest PaintShop Pro in several areas.

PaintShop Pro is one of the original graphics editors, stretching back over 10 years. This latest version of the program features a new interface, which is more logically organized. Gone are the cumbersome floating palettes, so much a feature of earlier iterations. The tool options palette, for example, is now a context-sensitive ribbon under the menu bar. Lifting a leaf out of the CorelDraw handbook, the colour palette and several others have been rearranged as dockers on the right-hand side of the screen, too.

The painting engine itself has been rewritten, to give smoother control over your brushstrokes and it's now quite possible to do delicate work with the mouse, where before a graphics tablet might have been necessary.

Several new tools have been introduced and others have been enhanced, so they’re equally useful to the casual photo retoucher and the professional digital artist. A couple of examples are the red-eye removal and erase-to-background tools. Red-eye removal calls up a two-pane dialog, for editing on the left and preview on the right. After highlighting each eye in turn and selecting the color and hue you want it to have, the result can be a very natural looking pair of irises.

Erase-to-background enables you to paint away any part of a photo and leave just the unpainted parts as a foreground image. It's more intelligent than a simple eraser and detects line edges, so works particulraly well on high-contrast subjects. Other new tools include warp and mesh warp brushes

A major new productivity feature is the scripting recorder, with which you can teach the program a task and get it to repeatedly run that sequence of operations. This is ideal, for example, if you want to convert a batch of files from one format to another or resize a series of images. --Simon Williams, Amazon.co.uk

Amazon.com Product Description
With a unique combination of automatic and precision tools for photo editing and graphic design, Paint Shop Pro is one of the most complete, easy-to-use professional digital imaging software packages available. And with version 8, you get all of the painting, drawing, and text options and tools of Paint Shop Pro 7, plus a full set of new creative choices to help streamline your tasks.

Transform snapshots into beautiful photographs with automatic enhancement tools, professional correction filters, and powerful retouching brushes. Design graphics from scratch or use preset shapes and effects to enhance your presentations or Web pages. Record common tasks as automatic scripts for easy image editing. Print photos in a variety of sizes and layout templates. Use the integrated learning system to help you deliver superior results with power and ease.

Customer Reviews

More like a PSP 7.5 than a PSP 8
Not much difference between version 8 and version 7. Version 7 was a leap forward from 6, but don't expect any such change between 7 and 8. If you don't own Paint Shop Pro 7, then go ahead and buy 8. If you already have 7, stick with it...there is almost no difference between what you already own and version 8. (I suspect some of the reviews on this and other products are by people associated with the companies that make them). PSP is a very good photo/paint program and a lot faster to use than the more well known (and incomprehensibly expensive) Adobe Photoshop. PSP has lots of ways to edit just about every aspect of an image (lots of ways you probably never knew about) and the features can be combined many, many ways so that even after using it for years you can still find new effects through experimentation. Best buy for the money, but again, if you already own 7, you pretty much already own most of 8. If you own any version earlier than 7, or if you don't own PSP at all, then by all means I would suggest PSP 8 over the competition.

upgrade from version 7
I upgraded to PSP 8 and love it. PSP 8 has been rewritten from the ground up and it shows. The background eraser, scripting, eyedroppers for black and white points, excellent photo tools and customizable interface make this version the best ever. I really love the way you can change and control almost everything from menus to buttons in PSP 8, making the user interface truly something you can use. In my opinion, PSP 8 is the only software the average person would need for photo enhancements and/or web graphics. Most of my use is for enhancing my photos from my 2 digital cameras. This new version makes many of my tasks much easier than before.

The best got better.....
Thought PSP 7 was great? Try this! I moved on to PSP 7 from PhotoShop 5.5 when PS was getting too expensive. I expected to lose a lot of the functionality of PS but was very pleasantly surprised.
Now with PSP 8, jasc have outdone themselves with a product that shines. We are all used to new versions and I suppose we start to get a bit jaded to get asked for more money for a new product that, in a lot of cases, is hardly better than the previous one.
That doesnt apply with PSP 8. It really is a great improvement on an already great product. For example: Scan an old faded photo in, press the "One step photo fix" and just look at the results unfold before your eyes! Astounding! This is one of the many new fully customisable "script" features.
And that`s just one of the many time savers this program has.
BUY IT!!!